How to Care for a Human Girl
A Novel
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From “a writer at the top of her game” (The New York Times) comes a bighearted and sharply funny debut novel about two estranged sisters and the crossroads they face after becoming unexpectedly pregnant at the same time.
Two years after the death of their mother, Jada and Maddy Battle both navigate unplanned pregnancies. Jada, a thirty-one-year-old psychology PhD student living in Pittsburgh, quietly obtains an abortion without telling her husband, but the secret causes turmoil in her already shaky marriage. Back home in rural Pennsylvania, nineteen-year-old Maddy, who spends her time caring for birds at a wildlife rehabilitation center, is paid off by the man who got her pregnant to get an abortion. But an unsettling visit to a crisis pregnancy center adds to her doubts about whether to go through with it.
Although Maddy still hasn’t forgiven Jada for a terrible betrayal, she goes to her for support, only to discover the cracks in the façade of her sister’s seemingly perfect life. As their past resentments boil over, the sisters must navigate the consequences of their choices and determine how best to care for themselves and each other.
With luminous prose and laser-sharp psychological insight, How to Care for a Human Girl is a compassionate and unforgettable examination of the complexities of choice, the special intimacy of sisterhood, and the bizarre ways our heated political moment manifests in daily life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wurzbacher's uneven debut (after the collection Happy Like This) explores two sisters' experiences with unplanned pregnancies. Jada and Maddy, 31 and 19, are grieving their mother, 18 months after her death from cancer. Jada, a social psychology PhD student, terminates an accidental pregnancy without consulting her husband or telling him she was pregnant. The study she's conducting on satisfaction from online dating becomes a metaphor for her own love life, as she struggles to choose between her husband, an old boyfriend she's begun seeing again, and her independence ("Constantly, in her mind, parallel worlds presented themselves, butting up against the one in which she was living"). In a concurrent storyline, Maddy gets pregnant by a married state senator after she was hired to clean his house. Ambivalent about what to do, she visits a crisis pregnancy center in hope of some guidance, and is persuaded to keep the baby. She invites herself to stay with her sister for a while, where old conflicts resurface, as Maddy confronts Jada about the course of their mother's treatment plans. Wurzbacher avoids didacticism when writing about abortion, focusing instead on the sisters' efforts to figure out their lives as best as they can, though a rushed resolution doesn't do justice to the characters' complexities. This doesn't quite fulfill its promise.
